Speaker
Description
The paper I’m proposing for the 2025 conference in Lecce continues the work I presented at the St Andrews conference on the connections among sovereignty, justice, and the passion of resentment in TMS. I have been interested in the way that Smith’s division of the impartial spectator into an ideal and an empirical principle of virtue allows for social and political critique when one relies on the voice within to sanction action against injustice--retaliation. Smith says the natural gratification of resentment accomplishes all the political goals of punishment, and when one acts in accord with the natural principles of justice, one can issue “sentences” that are, in principle, laws. Yet, this same identification of virtue with what we could call moral autonomy also has potentially destabilizing political implications that could, perhaps, enable the wise and the virtuous to “new model the constitution” in a revolution. Hence the virtuous person in TMS must both become and not become the impartial spectator. They must both remain indifferent to public norms and opinions, possibly beyond accountability to others, and yet a moral being is an accountable being for Smith, who makes sure (especially in the 1790 edition) that one always feels insecure, doubtful, potentially self-deceived and ignorant of one’s essential moral character—even if one knows oneself to be innocent. Hence, while corruption distances propriety from virtue, they must all the same cohere for Smith.
My aim in this paper is to think through what seems to me a striking, but unremarked, connection between Melville’s short story Billy Budd, set in 1797 during the Napoleonic Wars, and the political significance of resentment, especially in relation to Billy’s innocence with regard to the charge of rebellion. We know that Melville had some familiarity with the Wealth of Nations—enough to satirize it in his early novel Redburn, where the eponymous sailor-hero begins to read Smith’s treatise chapter-by-chapter but, finding that it was as “dry as crackers and cheese” and the “very leaves smelt of saw-dust,” he wraps his jacket around it and uses it as a pillow. I have found no evidence that Melville read TMS and had its discussion of resentment, justice, and innocence in mind when he wrote Billy Budd, but I plan to argue that Melville addresses precisely these issues so prominent in Smith’s treatise. Melville even uses the term resentment as Smith does to describe an offense against one’s dignity and worth that is considered an injustice (even “slavish”)—as, for instance, when the duplicitous master-of-arms Claggart falsely accuses the sailor Billy of organizing a mutiny because “he resents his impressment,” although Billy stutters, and strikes a blow, in “resentful eagerness” to rebut the accusation. In fact, the worry aboard ship of a mutiny is a worry about the “contagious fever” of revolutionary sympathy, sympathy with the resentment of those who have suffered injustice. I will discuss Hannah Arendt’s endorsement of the execution of Billy as a representative of a “natural, absolute innocence” that “can only act violently,” as well as Smith’s comment that “There is no greater tormentor of the human breast than violent resentment which cannot be gratified. An innocent man, brought to the scaffold by the false imputation of an infamous or odious crime, suffers the most cruel misfortune which it is possible for innocence to suffer.” My goal is to read the story as Melville’s political dramatization of the natural gratification of resentment by the innocent as a response to TMS. Innocence is a touchstone in both texts for complex questions of justice and the moral authority of sovereign power.
| Organization | International Smith Society |
|---|
